Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No problem. Be sure to let me know if you end up trying one.

Yah, I read up on CloudFrare, but it looks like a lot of people don't like them / suggest them. Some people even saying they lost a lot of rankings after using them.

I'm trying to decide if I should use a CDN to speed up my site. I've never used one before, but I do know that there are a lot of images on my site and I think that could help a great deal.

Are they hard to set up? Are there any down sides? And are the pricey?

Also I'm not sure even sure if it would make a difference for me, but I want to work on getting my site faster.

Thanks.

Few questions:

1. When do you know if you have out grown shared hosting?

2. Who do you suggest for shared hosting for a med sized blog? (At least I think I'd define our stie as. Any ideas what sort of traffic qualifies as small-traffic / med-traffic blog? )

This question is directly related to SEO, but I wanted to see if there was any wordpress / php pro's out there who wouldn't mind helping me with a few quick things.

The biggest one is I'm trying to move this facebook like button from where it is to the line of sharers above it. The sharers are being put in by the digg digg plug in, and the facebook button is being put in by the facebook plug in.

You can see it on my site, or on this plug in.

Thanks!

gEOa

Hmmm...what's interesting is that many folks suggest hosting it on youtube since google is now indexing youtube videos on your site. This way you get the traffic spike from youtube search, and google indexing the video.

Here's a link to see all the videos google has indexed for my site.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#q=site:noahsdad.com&hl=en&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ei=R3P3T5q-A6eL2AWYmrz_Bg&ved=0CEEQ_AUoAw&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=386d21ff68b140c&ion=1&biw=1289&bih=762

Thoughts?

Thanks. I guess what's confusing for me is that the images are still getting indexed with that option on or off.

Thanks. I'm using the Yoast plug in which does make an image site map. So I should be good there.

On this post it says that it won't harm you if you select that option http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success but it sounds like if googlebot won't index the image, that's hurting you.

Also when I look at google webmaster tools it shows my image sitemap and it appears the majority of my images are being indexed. Also if I search for images they show up on google image search.

But could be understanding what's happening incorrectly.

Are you sure the images won't get indexed with that option turned on?

One of the main reasons I selected that option was because of all the posts I've read online about how each image has a url and you don't want those urls to appear in the search engines.

Thoughts?

I'm using Yoast's wordpress seo plug in and a few months ago I enabled the feature that redirects all images to the parent post. This month I noticed a huge drop in my organic search results for images.

I just did a crawl of my site and it looks like every image does indeed have a 301 redirect on it. I'm curious what the though is on this. Should I unselect that option? I was under the impression it wouldn't make a difference with traffic and actually thought it would help since it brought people to the post instead of just the image page for that picture.

Thoughts?

Thanks. The host I'm using is really good, so I'm not sure switching hosts would be that different.

In regard to number of posts on home page, how many would you suggest?

I was wondering if someone had a few minutes to talk a look at our site and see how to speed it up. I've ran some of the speed tests and I get different results, so I'm not sure if my site would be considered "slow" or not.

Also if there any other things that jump out at you (usability, side bar, things I should change / add / take away to make a users experience better, etc.) please let me know. Any feedback is good feedback to me.

I'm using WP Super Cache as well.

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback, that's sort of what I was thinking as well.

Yelp, go with the 301 redirect.

I agree with Ryan. Without being more specific it's impossible to tell what is going on. It could be any number of things. One thing you could do is look at GA for your top pages, then look at what keywords are bringing people to those pages. If a large majority is "not given" you may be able to guess what some of those words are if that makes sense.

I've heard different thoughts on this and wanted to see what you the seomoz group thought. I have been leaving my "brand" out of my titles so I could create longer titles (without my "brand" taking up precious space.) I've also read that adding your brand can take away from the words you want to optimize for in the title / post.

I've read other places that you want your brand in every page title to "strengthen" your brand.

Long story short, I'm trying to figure out if I should add my brand to the my page / post titiles, or leave them as is.

Feel free to check out my site and current title template if you'd like.

Thanks!

Hi, you may want to send this in as a feature request to the seoMOZ team (if you are hoping to have this as an seomoz tool that is.)

I know they read the forums, but if you send it in directly via the contact from as a feature request, it'll go directly to the team that looks through those requests.

You may have already done that, but I just wanted to share.

I think it depends on the site, design, content, etc. If you are careful with your ad placement and your users can EASILY find the difference between your content and your ads, I think you'll be ok.

Good isn't anti-ads like some articles you read would lead you to believe. In fact, Google even has material showing a user where they suggest placing ads on a page. Be sure to check out that link, especially sense you were asking about adsense.

I also know some bloggers that have ads set to display a set time after a post goes live, for instance 2 weeks after, that way your regular readers aren't having to look at ads, mainly organic traffic. However, if ads are done correctly (used sparingly, they take a back seat to content, etc) they can actually blend in nicely on a page.

Again, think like a user. If you were visiting a site what would you want to see? You probably wouldn't mind a few ads, placed in areas where you would expect to find ads, ads that are well done (if I use adsnese I ONLY use the graphic / media rich ads), and ones that are contextual to the site you are reading. (I've actually found adsense to pretty good at showing ads that are contextual on the page.)

Please let us know if you have any more questions.

Ok, thanks. I was reading an article by Google about how pages with thin content can actually hurt your site (even if the rest of your site has good content.) The article said if you have thin pages with little or no content on your site, that can cause harm to the entire site.

You don't hink this would apply in this situation?  Thanks for the feedback by the way, I'm learning.

Thanks!

Thanks!

I've been contacted by several sites (a few in other countries) who would like to repost some of our articles on their site. A few of these are in other countries and they would like to translate them in their language. (we have a site about raising a child with Down syndrome so they are wanting to use our info to help people...not "beat us" in rankings, or anything like that.)

I didn't know what the best practice on this was. I don't want to get dinged for duplicate content or have someone rank higher than me for my own article, etc. Just curious what the best way to go about this was.

I'm also assuming the articles that are translated wouldn't be an issue at all since the content will be in another language. Is this right?

Thanks!

I share a lot of images via twitter and over the last year I've used several different tools to do this; mainly twitpic, and now instagram. Last year I wanted to try to find a way to host those images on my site so I could get the viewers of the picture back to my site instead a 3rd party (twitpic, etc.)

I found a few plugins that worked "sort of" well, and so I used that for a while. (I have since stopped doing that in favor of using instagram.)

But my question is do all of these image posts hurt my site you think? I had all of these images under a category called "twitter" but have since moved them to an uncategorized category until I figure out what I want to do with them.

I wanted to see if anyone could chime in and give me some advice. Since the posts are just images with no content (other than the image) and the title isn't really "optimized" for anything do these posts do me more harm than good. Do I delete them all? Leave them as is? Or do something else?

Also in hindsight I'm assuming this was a bad idea since the bounce rate for people clicking on a link just to see an image was probably very high, and may have caused the opposite result of what I was looking for.

If I knew than what I know now I would have tracked the bounce rate of those links, how many people who viewed one of those images actually went to another page on the site, etc. But hindsight's 20/20.

No worries.

My real question is still why the redirect is showing up as a 404 when the site is crawled. I'd still be interested in figuring that out if you have any thoughts.

Thanks.

Ryan,

Thanks for your feedback. Wordpress automatically redirects to the non http version.

Regarding https sites I dont know many personal sites that pay for a https cert (or even why there would be a need.) Also I don't link to anything with https. It doesn't seem really seem necessary (unless I"m missing something.)

Heck, I just tried to go to https://seomoz.com and their site doesn't even go there.

Yah, but my site is http://noahsdad.com/ - should I expect https to also work?

Yelp, the crawl just happened today.

Also you'll have to excuse my ignorance but I'm not sure what you mean by the last half of your comment. "my site does not handle https protocol well?"

Can you explain that to me. (I'm still learning.)

Thanks for taking the time to help by the way.

Thanks Ryan! Have a great 4th of July!

Ahh, got ya. That's a great question, I'll look forward to reading the replies. I personally don't mess with the home page title tag, but have tweaked some of the blog post title tags. I normally just wait and see if I notice a chance 30 days after I change the title, but nothing real scientific.

Hey Nathan, I think it would depend on what your overall goals are, what the title tag you have now is, etc.  If you look at seoMoz's title tag you'll notice they don't have a call to action or anything in their title tag. They have developed the brand.

In regard to your site, have you built a brand for it? Are you selling merch? Is it a blog? Does the content on the home page change often?

I did away with a vague category and 301 redirected the category url to the home page. However the link is reporting as a 404 in Moz Tools when it scans my site. Here's the link, and as you can see it redirects to the home page. Just curious if I did something wrong. Thanks.

Thanks for the kind words. As I mentioned sometimes I like to do full width posts which are 1170 wide so if I use 800x600 the images won't show up correctly on full screen.

Yes, i use catching. But like I said, saving it for 640 wouldn't work for me since I want image to show up bigger than that if the screen is 1170. I'm assuming the images wouldn't be able to be resized any bigger than 640 without looking stretched.

I'm using a few different plug ins to give me various Facebook functions on my site. I'm curious there are any developers out there would could take a look at my source code and see if it looks there is some code being duplicated that's slowing down my site. Thanks so much!

I'm using smushit to make the file size smaller, but I need to be able to at least have 1170 for full width posts (like this one.)  I don't think I need to use save for web if I'm using smush it do I?

Does having css resize the images cause a site to slow down a lot?

I'm trying to figure out why I'm having speed issues with my site, and using google speed test to help me knock out some of the issues.

One of issues deals with image resizing. I have a responsive design and so even though on the home page the normal width is 580 of the blog area, the full post can go up to 1170. So I size all of my images to 1170 wide and let CSS resize them depending on the size of the browser. (The images on the most recent post are a little bigger than this because I was testing something.)

I was wondering what the best practice was in regard to what I'm trying to do.

Also feel free to check out my site and let me know of any other feedback / advice you have. Thanks !:)

I''ll try to find the link where he talks about using pages instead of posts and share it. Curious to hear your thoughts on it.

I'll go ahead and select that option, thanks for your help. (On a side note, what do people not using this plug in do? I'm assuming not many people do this, right?)

You think there is any benefit to doing it, or just one of those "hey why not" sort of things?

Thanks for taking the time to check into it. One I'm concerned with is how this will effect long tail seo / indexing of the comments. How will this effect my organic traffic? (will it hurt it?)

I don't see these sorts of pages coming up in google now, so I'm not sure what selecting that option does (and how it effects the site.)

Yoast does a few things different with his site, and I don't always follow his lead. For example he suggets making new pages instead of new posts for your blog posts. He's the only one I've ever heard say this, or do this.

hmm..thanks for the feedback. So do you suggest not blocking those? (and I'll message yoast also and see what his thoughts are.)

Thanks.

I want to make some changes to my personal website and need a little help.

I originally hired someone to create this site for me several years ago. Most of the site (including the home page) is html, but the blog part (/blog) is wordpress.

The main site hasn't been updated in a few years (although the blog has been updated more often.) I'm not really targeting any keywords on my site (other than just my name) so I'm not really concerned about loosing any rank or anything.

I"m just curious what the best route to go should be. Would you suggest keeping the site's format "as is" so to speak? (make the front page a landing page so to speak that links to my various sites, a little bio, etc; keep an about page, contact, /blog, etc...? ) Or should I go the more traditional route and make the blog the front page?

Another route is to someone keep the most recent (1,2,or 3) posts on the home page (landing page) and sort of make it a landing page / recent post page. It's sort of like that now, only the main page just links to the most recent post instead of actually adding the post, if that makes sense.

There maybe some themes out there that would work well, so feel free to suggest one if you know one that would work. I think the Aboutme.com pages look pretty nice and will let you use a custom domain, but I'm not sure. (And it's not a complete theme, so not sure that's the best option.)

Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words, I agree, he is a cutie. Will blocking those cause the comments not to be indexed though?

As there other folks have said billions of web pages is a lot of work. But the question you have is why is the work not done by the time they say it will be done sometimes.

They have posted detailed explanations every time there was a problem. (Including this week.) Have you had a chance to check out there posts?

I'm using Yoast's wordpress plugin and there is an option to remove the replytocom variables. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts were on that, and if I should do it.

Here's the site if you need to see it.

Thanks!

Ha,ha..Oh sorry! I didn't catch that.

And yah, he is one happy little panda.

Thanks Dan. This is great info, and your post was great. Right now I'm ont really using tags, and just using categories (around 4.) I'm about to start adding a few more categories and some child categories.

If you get a chance feel free to check out my site and see if my structure look ok. I'd appreciate it.

Hmmm.I'm not sure I'm following what you are doing (or vis versa)

You can check out my site if you'd like, and you can see I have big buckets for things (like therapy.) But I have so many posts under that, I need to make them into child categories. But if I do I can't use the url for the main 'landing' page. (If that makes sense.)

I checked out the link you posted and it looks like when I click on one of your category names I'm taken to a page that has a different url. Is there a reason for that? From what I understand it's best to let users know where they are going when they click on a link. Was there a reason you didn't have the url the same as the catagory they clicked on in your menu?

(I'm still learning so forgive me in advance if I'm missing something.)

Thanks for the reply Lindsay, but that's the problem I'm running into. If I use the mysite/physical-therapy, etc pages for the detailed content page I won't be able to use that url for the categories of the posts. This is a blog so there are lots of posts that go into that bucket. You can check it out here.

I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy.

However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words.

I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.

Thanks for the help.

By the way, who is the happy panda?

I'm using Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin on my wordpress site which allows you to quickly set up nofollow / no index on specific taxonomies. I wanted to see what you guys thought was the best practice in setting up my various taxonomies.

Would you noidex, but follow all of these, none of these, or just some of these:

Categories, tags, media, author archives ( (My blog is mainly a single author blog (me) but my wife does sometimes write posts. So I didn't know how this effected everything. Also I could simply make the blog a single user blog and just have her posts be guest posts, but I'd rather leave her as a user.), and  date archives.

The example I read on line only no-index's the date archives. Just curious what you guys thought.

Thanks.

I totally agree.